The most effective way I found when sharing with Customers and Partners the concept of Office Business Applications (OBAs) is to show screen captures of possible application scenarios. Unfortunately, not many examples showcasing Office 2007 that can be publicized yet exist ... until now.

In the Convergence conference event that just recently concluded, the Microsoft Dynamics team showcased working examples and prototypes of Office clients interacting with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics GP ("Great Plains") products. (More information can be found at Mary Jo Foley's All About Microsoft blog entry: Microsoft shows off its future business-app user interfaces.)

We can glean a couple of scenarios revolving around Office clients (Outlook, Word, Excel) and SharePoint Server.

For example, Microsoft Dynamics CRM uses Outlook as its built-in interface -- which makes perfect sense since a mail client is the most common entry point for managing customer and contact oriented information and activities.

I am particularly partial to the the following screen which shows Microsoft Word leveraged as a report with embedded business data pulled from Dynamics ERP application. Microsoft Word's content controls, OpenXML file format, and custom Task Panes enable richer interactions with the Line-of-Business backends while preserving clean data / view separation.

Finally, Microsoft SharePoint provides a rich role-based user interface for composing different information. In the example below, we see a Sales Center page in SharePoint with an Excel services web part serving as an effective intranet dashboard. 

Go to ZDNet.com gallery for more screen shots of how Dynamics can and will work with Office: screen shot gallery.